Enough About Love

LOUISE AND THOMAS

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JUDITH WAS SO FRIGHTENED she is not even crying. Louise is trying to comfort her little girl, but Judith is terrified, she is shaking. There was a screech of brakes, the wheels hit the stroller, but Judith is unharmed. The van stopped with the stroller crumpled under its axle; the doll flew out onto the road. The driver leaped out, a big black man, he just keeps saying to Judith, “You’re not hurt, are you? You’re not hurt?” He is shaking more than she is.

It is a Sunday in December, the first Louise has spent with Thomas along with Judith and Maud: they have never met him before. Maud discovered that if you say Thomas Thomas over and over it sounds like “stomma stomma stomma.” Judith thought that mommy’s friend really did have a load of white hair, more than daddy, she chuckled and whispered as much to her older sister, so their mother could not hear.

“What’s all this muttering, Judith?” Louise asked.

Judith ran ahead, laughing, she turned to look at her big sister as she started crossing the road. Thomas was the one who saw it coming. He reached out his arm, grabbed the child, and hauled her back. He apologizes to her for squeezing her arm so hard. He hurt her, she gives him a hard time. She’s going to have a bruise. The driver has gone to get the doll, has extricated the stroller. It falls apart, is irreparable.

“What’s your name, sweetheart? I’ll buy you a new one.”

Thomas says there is no need, walks him back to the van.

They were meant to go to the Evolution Gallery at the Jardin des Plantes. Louise is completely drained, she just wants to sit down, have a coffee. Thomas asks the girls what they would like. Hot chocolate. Now, that’s a good idea. Four hot chocolates.

“Thomas saved your life,” Maud tells her sister. Marveling at the enormity of her words, she says them again: “Thomas saved your life.”

“What does that mean, mommy, saved my life?” Judith asks her mother.

Louise does not answer. She is hugging her daughter, suffocating her. She looks up at Thomas, closes her eyes, tears glistening beneath her eyelids.

Thomas drinks his hot chocolate slowly. Judith and Maud play with their spoons and the cocoa left in their cups. The fear is forgotten, for a moment. But the terror is gradually working its way through Louise. Thomas can almost read her agitated thoughts. What if Judith had died? She would have left him, most likely. Pain destroys desire, no love could survive guilt like that. She could only have coped with the shared suffering with Judith’s father, in fact she would only have wanted to try and overcome it with him.

“Thank you,” Louise says eventually.

Thomas shakes his head. In these few minutes of his life, he can see a fork in his own destiny. That was the word Anna used in her last session, when she said, “I don’t know whether Yves is my destiny.” Coming from Anna, the word was ambiguous, somewhere between freedom of choice and the inevitability of fate.

Thomas does not believe in fate. He would have the power of speech and actions shape our lives. To him, that is the point of psychoanalysis, giving the analysand the strength to become the driving force in his or her own life. If the accident just now had actually happened, he likes to think that, against all the odds, he would have known how to play it right, to become one of the people Louise would lean on.

As a teenager, he had endless discussions about the elasticity of individual fates and History (with a capital H, as Perec used to say). The budding Marxist confronted trainee Hegelians. If Hitler had died in a car crash in 1931, would some inertia in the powers that be have doggedly set the war and the Holocaust back on track? Was Stalinism conceivable with a different Stalin? Who could have replaced Trotsky?

Other questions hover. Where did he stand in Louise’s story? Did a lover have to turn up at this particular point in her life? Was he interchangeable? Thomas has no idea. He doubts there is some hidden agenda. A breakup has not already happened before the meeting occurs. There are more chance events and contingencies than necessities. Of course, in an ecosystem, occupying the same niche requires the same response: all large marine predators are alike, sharks for the fish, killer whales for mammals, plesiosaurs for dinosaurs. But man is not the natural world, history is not evolution, and Thomas has stopped trying to find a material or scientific answer to a question that could never be either of these. He will never know whether he or Hitler was replaceable, ersetzbar. Suffice to say, life never serves up the same dish twice.

Judith and Maud have finished their hot chocolate. They want to go home. So does Louise. They can go and see the thousands of butterflies and the big white whale another time. Louise opens the door to the apartment building, the girls run upstairs. Louise turns to Thomas.

“If Judith had … I wouldn’t have had the strength for anything, you know. I couldn’t have gone on. My life would have stopped.”

“No,” Thomas says. “No. That’s the worst thing, it wouldn’t have stopped.”